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Amazon’s Prime Day Fails To Impress

I posted about the Amazon Prime Day and I posted some of the deals that I thought were worth it. However i was done pretty quick with just 10 or so items. Out of those, the best ones were gone pretty quick. Soon it became obvious that the “better than Black Friday” comments weren’t entirely true.

Social media soon filled up with complaints of lackluster merchandise, paltry discounts and all-around disappointment after Amazon failed to impress with their lightning deals. Hashtags such as #WeirdPrimeDay and #PrimeDayFail quckly went viral on Twitter. Prime Day was compared to a huge garage sale.

By some accounts, it was a huge success: Amazon sales were up 80% in the U.S. European sales grew by 53%. Amazon said that the rate of sales orders during parts of Prime Day eclipsed Black Friday. And that makes sense, because it was well advertised and there were discounts.

But rather than focusing on delivering the best customer experience possible, Amazon built up Prime Day in order to jack up all-important Prime memberships and attempt to quickly unload tons of merchandise, regardless of the bad long-term taste it left behind and the trust sacrificed in the process. The waiting lists and the best deals selling out in minutes, were the worst of it.

Amazon had actually offered better prices in the recent past on items like the Amazon Echo and Fire TV Stick than it did on Prime Day.

According to BrandWatch, there were nearly as many negative social media mentions of Prime Day as there were positive: 41,000 vs. 47,000. That’s bad.

Californians were talking about Amazon Prime Day the most, contributng 12% of the conversation in the United States. That’s in part due to the fact that many West Coasters were furious that they woke up to sold-out deals that those nasty East Coasters had already bought up earlier in the morning. Yet Californians in large part had the most positive things to say about Amazon Prime Day, beating out New York (the second most-positive state).

Still, compared to Black Friday, Amazon Prime Day produced just 1/20 of the social media noise. It generated about 200,000 social mentions, compared to the 3 million social mentions from Black Friday 2014.